Originally posted by NorwoodBloke Kali has moves that attack the opponents fists with glancing blows from your elbows when defending, bare knuckle boxers sometimes intentionally take blows on the hard part of their skull for the same effect and vale tudo fighters often slap instead of hooking to protect their hands.
The hands aren't weak you just need to be careful what you do with them in training.

That is soooooooooooooo wierd... my amatur self-learned kata has something like this. I've never seen Vale Tudo or Kali stuff...

I prefer open handed strikes. First things first, I can't deal with punches well and I don't like using them, but if I can hit someone while attampting to grab them, well palm heel's good and a lot nicer on my hands.

No matter how much instruction I get and how perfect a boxing guy says my left hook looks, after ten jab-cross-hooks my left wrist is killing me on the hook, ick. Without a target it looks fine, but I think the deal is, every time I throw my hook, my hand ends up rolling inwards...... fucking annoying.

While the palm heel presents the problem of the hand possibly being bent backwards against the wrist (ow) I very rarely encounter that kind of problem.

But hey, punchinghas worked and continues to work good for billions of people now and throughout history ^_^ must be something to it I'm fucking up!

I like doing shitloads of knuckle puchups and striking a punching bag for hand/knuckle conditioning. I agree 100% with what has been said. A clenched fist should be used to strike flesh/muscle/tissue. Using open hand palm strikes are just as powerful as the fist.

Boxers have told me that if you hit someone (even with gloves) properly, you will feel it in the back of your hand and in your wrist, unless you wrap your hands. I dunno since I don't wrap my hands (too cheap to buy em), but I just finished a test and pretty much most parts of my hand(s) is (are) sore. We had to end the test with sparring so i'm sure my technique had dwindled after an hour.